


The Hunt

by herefortheAU



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, I'm Bad At Tagging, Tarsus IV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26079496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herefortheAU/pseuds/herefortheAU
Summary: Basically I don't think Jim would just leave it alone after Tarsus IV. I mean, even if he's traumatized, I don't think he would be satisfied not knowing what happened to Kodos, or not seeing a dead body or whatever. So I wrote a fic because it wouldn't leave me alone. And I've never written a fic before, but here ya go, here is Jim after Tarsus in a universe where he didn't think "he's probably dead" was a good enough answer.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 140





	The Hunt

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I've mostly just read fanfic, not written it. So this is coming to you un-beta'd from someone who's watched some (not all) of TOS and then all the AOS movies. And then just read a bunch of Star Trek Fan Fic. 
> 
> So. 
> 
> Do with that info what you will, but probably this is not accurate to either series.

When he was younger his grandfather had taught him how to hunt. He’d been six, and his mother had left him and his brother with Tiberius as she sailed out into the black. Sam had been sullen and stayed at the cabin, but Jim had allowed his grandpa to dress him up in camo at ass o’clock in the morning and haul him out to a duck blind and they proceeded to sit there and wait. For hours. 

The secret to hunting, Tiberius had told him, was patience. He was too young to understand at the time, and later would be too preoccupied with surviving the abuse of his stepfather, but those words proved to be a guide for him in his later years.

Because at age thirteen, after spending two years on Tarsus IV and surviving on his will alone, Jim decided to take up hunting as an occupation.

It had been a deliberate decision. The Starfleet captain had been talking to the CMO after having tried, as he had daily for countless weeks, to get Jim to talk. He hadn’t known that Jim had been conscious, and Jim liked it that way. In the weeks he’d been stuck in the biobed he’d learned how to control his heart rhythms to keep the nosy doctors from bothering him. If only his control could extend to times when he was actually sleeping, he’d be all set. 

The CMO had reported to the captain that the body they had found burned in the governor’s mansion matched all physical descriptions of Governor Kodos. There was no DNA on file for governor Kodos and therefore no way to prove definitively that it was him. The captain had sighed and said it couldn’t be anyone else, and how would Kodos have gotten off planet? Three Starfleet ships had been in orbit.

Jim had known then, known in the sick gut feeling he had, in the way soldiers know they are about to die in battle, in the way you see tragedies in slow motion he had known, known, known that Kodos was not dead. Whatever burnt corpse the CMO was looking at, it wasn’t Kodos.

And that could not stand.

Three thousand, nine hundred and one people. Dead. Nine starved and tortured. And Four thousand cowards who saw the murders, saw the guards hunting down children, saw and did nothing. And Kodos, who had orchestrated the entire thing, had never answered for it. 

Well he would. 

Jim immediately began using the PADDs of any absent minded medical staff to hack into the ship's communications array and record any and all chatter. Files were intercepted and offloaded for later decryption. Individuals were catalogued. In the four months it took them to stabilize and organize all survivors, find destinations for every survivor, and transport everyone where they needed to be Jim had months worth of audio files. 

He slips their leash when they land in San Francisco. He slips their leash and goes to Riverside, carefully hacking into Frank’s work record and framing him for several crimes, and then making sure he gets caught. 

Once the farmhouse is empty, Jim begins to listen. He listened to all the files. He follows all the leads he can, when his skills fall short he adds himself to the local college classes. Engineering, computer engineering, computer programming, he can’t quite pass himself off as being old enough for advanced hand to hand combat, but he starts with beginning, which allows him to watch advanced classes and he practices. He gets better. There isn’t much he can’t hack into now, and he’s ready to follow his leads off planet. He works his way across the galaxy, works for food and transport, learns how to speak all sorts of languages, learns to rebuild engines and computers, learns to fly, learns how to lie, learns how to disguise himself in plain sight. He gets acquainted with the seediest parts of every city, learning the ways of pirates and the black market, learning how to get information not readily available to the everyday civilian. 

He learns how to follow people without them noticing, how to set alerts on their PADDS, their homes, their hovercrafts, their everything. He sits in metaphorical duck blinds and waits because this hunt, this prey, is worth it. He grows up among the stars, grows strong, gains weight, gains muscles, gains experience and aggression. He is the predator he wished he was at age thirteen, when he was hiding with eight crying children in caves. 

He watches over those children from a distance now, using the skills he has gained. They keep him energetic and hungry. They are the reason he still follows the trails, no matter how thin, no matter how old. They will never feel safe again, and he is the same, but at least they can feel safe from Kodos. They can look upon his dead body and feel relief. They can know their personal boogeyman is dead. 

At twenty-one he finds himself in a predicament. He needs access to Starfleet’s secure files on Tarsus IV. He has no doubt that he could hack in, it’s hacking back out with the files that would get him caught and finding a workaround for that would take a tediously long amount of time. A good two years of careful programming. 

It would be far easier to do if he could do it from inside the system. If he could get the codes from an admiral or captain. Not willingly, of course, but Jim is patient and observant and there isn’t much he can’t puzzle out. With extended amounts of time around people, no one's passwords are ever secure.

So, with a sigh, he journeys back to Riverside. Finding a way in is harder than he thinks. He has been off planet for so long that simply enlisting, especially since they have records of him being on Tarsus IV and blatantly hating Starfleet afterwards, would look odd. He still hates Starfleet. But this is a means to an end. Nothing more. 

He seeds backstory in several locations all across the Midwest, making it look like he never left Riverside, like he just got into trouble and nothing else. He finds Captain Pike, a man who admired his father enough to be manipulated by Jim’s name alone, and he goes to a bar. Finding a way to start a fight is easy. An overgrown piss poor excuse for a security officer had been eyeing a beautiful mocha-skinned girl way too possessively and she had been ignoring him determinedly. It wasn’t challenging to insert himself into the situation and make enough of an ass of himself that the security guy felt like he was stepping on toes. 

After that the only tricky part was making sure that he was reluctant in front of Pike, but not so reluctant that the Captain would stop trying. It was a delicate balance, because he didn’t know Pike’s exact level of dedication to the Kirk name. 

Turned out, very. After the dare Jim knew he could show up and Pike would think that was what did it. He had his way in, and the story would make it sound like Pike had talked him into it. If only they knew. 

The shuttle ride proved interesting. The grumpy doctor was drunk and strung out and if Jim Kirk could ever relate to anything, it was that, so he got them assigned to the same room. He figured the man would either be busy at Starfleet medical or drunk, and so he would be free to continue his hunting without too many questions.

He never expected to make friends with the man. He supposed that’s what people would call it. Jim had been hunting too long to think of it as anything other than a strategy. It was good to have a doctor in your corner, especially when you used semester breaks to follow the leads that you spent your entire semester hacking into sealed records to get, and you came back from those hunting trips broken and bloody and with no prey to show for your efforts. Injuries that could not be allowed to show up on the official Starfleet Medical Records. Bones quickly became an asset, and so Jim endeavored not to annoy the man overmuch, and to keep him happy when the occasion called for it.

He strategically made friends with Gaila for her history and knowledge of the Orion slave market, and developed an acquaintance with the mocha-skinned beauty from the bar. Uhura loathed him too much to turn it into a friendship but he groveled enough to get her to let him into the language club, which was all he wanted in the first place. He needed to practice his Andorian.

Classes were easy, coursework was easy, the sims were a fucking joke. Advanced hand to hand combat was only challenging when the instructor was fighting him, and even then it stopped being challenging after a while. Three years passed with him looking for information, the hunt slowed slightly, but not stopped. The Kobayashi-Maru was the only time he consented to pull his attention from the fading fragments of information trails on The Executioner’s possible location. The test insulted him to his very core, offended a part of him that had fought for life, clawed for breath from birth, that didn’t know how to sit back and relax because Jim had been born struggling to survive and no one had ever taught him it could be any different. 

It frustrated him enough that he cheated. Something he’d never before had to do academically, his genius and experience having previously kept him in perfect marks. Then everything spiraled out from there, the hearing, the call to muster, Vulcan, finding another boogeyman, a new one, and feeling all the frustrated rage from his so far failed hunt come bubbling up and manifesting in his desire to end this Romulan. 

Spock who somehow didn’t understand how hunting worked, even after his planet was destroyed. Spock, who had no concept of revenge and retaliation and the feelings that were driving this evil this time. So he fought Spock and Nero until Spock gave way and then he hunted. He boarded the ship with Spock to show the man what it should look like, let the Vulcan leave with the future ship and moved swiftly and silently through the ship, killing his way to Pike.

Then he came upon Nero. And in a way it was good that this happened, good that he faced this evil before finding his own personal one, because the rage manifested in a red haze that clouded his vision and he attacked without strategy, something he hadn’t done since he was thirteen on a dying planet. It ended badly for Jim, but he managed to survive, and they got out, he and Pike and then Spock managed to crash the Jellyfish into the mining ship and then the black hole and it was over.

A bad thing, but good practice. 

So when he became Captain, Jim decided to stay in Starfleet. Access to their intelligence was helpful, the pay level meant he had money to bribe his contacts on the shadier side of things, and the ship meant he could feasibly find reasons to travel to locations where he needed to meet contacts. Plus he needed his vulcan first officer to teach him to meditate, to control the rage. He would not get a second chance when he found Kodos, and his control was appalling. A hunter had to recognize when they should improve their aim. 

And so he captained, and searched, hunted and meditated. 

And then Khan happened. He only slipped into a killing rage one time, and Bones was there to pull him out of it. After everything that happened, Marcus’ betrayal reminding him why he hated Starfleet, Khan showing him what he could potentially become if he went on hunting for too long he finally went into that warp core frustrated. Knowing that either way, if he did or didn’t go in, he would die and be unable to bring Kodos to justice. Might as well make sure it was just him and not everyone else too. Maybe they would find his painstaking years of research and follow through on the hunt. 

But in the end he doesn’t mention it to Spock. It is too big a secret to share, even while dying.

When he wakes up after not expecting it, he has a lot of time in the hospital to sit and think. His crew believes he is soul-searching, but in fact the only searching he is doing is on the net. If ever there were a time for a scum sucking soulless cretin to poke his head out of a hole it would be now when Starfleet is so weakened. 

A year later they are on the five year mission and one of the Tarsus nine is shipping out with them. Ensign Kevin Riley doesn’t pretend not to recognize him, and Jim carefully doesn’t mention that he’s been electronically monitoring the man’s entire life to make sure he is healthy and well. The ensign sticks close to Jim, just like he did when he was six on a dying planet. Riley doesn’t like talking about Tarsus IV mostly because it was so terrible, but also because he was so young at the time. It is more distant for him than it is for Jim. Less real. Jim thinks this can only be a good thing. 

Finally, finally, finally he gets a solid lead. They are pretty far away and he has to juggle the Admirals, and his own crew, but he pulls every debt ever owed him, gets them shore leave on Rigel II, and hires private detectives to lay some groundwork for him.

When they land he’s already tailored the duty roster to keep Riley on board for the first two days while he is out so that there is no chance of him being in the way.

He attends the Shakespeare play to make sure and knows when his vision turns crimson the second Mercutio takes the stage that he’s found him. It takes him the rest of the play to calm himself down. After the play he carefully waits until Kodos, going by Anton Karidian now, is alone in his dressing room, stuns him, binds him, gags him, makes extra sure he’s unconscious with a hypospray, and hauls the man to a warehouse he’d located prior to landing. 

Then he just sits and watches him.

The hunt is over, the man is captured. Jim has never allowed himself to think past this moment. Past finding him. Because he always thought he would kill the man. But now he’s not sure. A slow and painful death is exactly what the man deserves. But if Jim kills him he will have to hide the body and make sure no one ever finds out. But he wants people to find out. Wants people to know that Jim was right right right, that the man was still alive but is dead now. Wants the rest of the Tarsus nine, wants Riley, to see the body and know the evil is dead. And if he has the body discovered, people will eventually figure out it was him. Starfleet definitely will. And so he will be arrested.

If he wants to remain the captain, he can’t have the body be found. If he wants Riley to find peace, the body has to be discovered somehow. 

Jim is surprised to find that he wants to remain captain. Wants to remain in Starfleet. There are parts of the organization he still hates, certainly, but it is much easier to change Starfleet now that he’s their shining poster boy. And if he can change it into what he wants, he thinks it might even be a good thing to have. 

And friends. Friends are a good thing to have. Strategically optimal. Good for his health. Good for his stress levels. And his crew are pretty good friends. 

So he has to have the body found alive. Jim mulls it over. It will mean a trial. It will mean a lot of painful memories dragged up. It will mean his crew discovering his biggest, closest held secret. But it will mean closure for the nine. And retaining the captaincy for Jim.

And he can always pay a prisoner to shank Kodos in jail, anyway.

So he hauls the body over his shoulder and drags him back to the Enterprise. This will mean a lot of explaining.


End file.
